Redneck Riviera: Armadillos, Outlaws, and the Demise of an American Dream

From the author of the National Book Award finalist, Salvation on Sand Mountain , a quixotic, comic account of one man's quest for a small piece of the American Dream. Every year, Dennis Covington's father brought his family to the Gulf Coast of the Florida Panhandle, the "Redneck Riviera," and it seemed there was no place he was happier. Florida was an intoxicant to him. In 1965 he made the only investment of his life--two and a half acres of an inland Florida development called River Ranch Acres. Years after his death, the development went bankrupt, setting the stage for a classic, often violent, confrontation over land use and property rights.Deed in hand, Dennis Covington journeys into the Wild West of the Redneck Riviera to claim his only inheritance. His quest charts a dangerous course: His life is threatened, his truck torched, and his small plot shot up and vandalized as his father's passion to possess the land becomes his own. Redneck Riviera is a personal journey as well as a brilliant look at the clash of values that is tearing apart much of rural America in a place beyond the law.

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About the Author:

Dennis Covington is the author of two novels, a memoir and the nonfiction book Salvation on Sand Mountain, which was a 1995 National Book Award finalist. He is also a journalist and a professor of literature at the University of Alabama. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama.